


and such is the torment (of the giving of your organs)

by cartographies



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 06:26:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1418352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cartographies/pseuds/cartographies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He looks slightly ill at ease, she thinks, but maybe it is just that she wishes him to be. She wants to undo him as much he undoes her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and such is the torment (of the giving of your organs)

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for pretty vague recollection of the kind of unpleasant wedding night to be expected of an arranged marriage between two inexperienced 14 year olds, as well as discussion of F/F and M/M sex as foreplay in a heterosexual relationship, if that might bother you.
> 
> Thanks to Gillian and Sonia for looking it over. Title is from Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's "The Nothing Pt. II"

It is the most foolish thing Anne has ever done, far more reckless than that night a month ago. If she felt the desire for a reflection on her actions, she would be forced to conclude that the walls of convents have suddenly produced a penchant for wildness in her.

She has come to the convent of Saint-Germain, as she has so frequently done in her time as queen, for the purpose of spiritual reflection and solitude. So she says. Truthfully, the walls and gardens of this redoubtable religious institution are more apt to produce a spirit of merriment between she and her ladies. It is the one place she can be fairly sure is free of the cardinal’s spies, and the ones she believes lurk among the members of her household she leaves behind at court. She and her women spend their days lazily, playing cards and spending far more time lightening their hair in the sun, their faces veiled, than at prayer. The Mother Superior was once a woman of the world before she gave herself to God, and the convent is filled with the second and third daughters of noblemen who greatly treasure the freedom allowed them.

She sits in a cell identical to all the others surrounding her. It is a far cry from the Spartan furnishings of the one that she was forced to take refuge in. The bed is comfortable, there is a gilt mirror resting on the wall, and thick tapestries ward away the chill. It is awash in the soft light of more candles than the entire rural convent probably possessed.

It is well after midnight and she thinks she has given up hope of him answering her summons, but nonetheless she sits up, her tension manifesting in the chills rippling across her flesh.

Everything around her is quiet. Madame de Rohan waits in the antechamber, kept wide awake no doubt by the thrill of partaking in illicit scheming. Marie has long awaited the moment her mistress would allow her to take the role of world-weary older mentor, ushering her younger charge through the pitfalls of passion, while sighing suggestively as one who has seen it all countless times before. The fact that she is assisting treason most likely only occurs to her as an added bonus. Anne trusts her very little, and the thought makes the blood lurch in the pulse at the base of her neck.

Then, so caught up in her thoughts that it comes without warning, the door opens and Aramis fills it.

Anne feels the urge to rise from the chair and stand, but she quashes it. Her hands rest on it’s cushioned arms; she too fights the desire to clench them in their lap.

“I had about given up on you coming, Monsieur Aramis.” She says it quietly, and it carries easily across the chamber on the still air. He looks slightly ill at ease, she thinks, but maybe it is just that she wishes him to be. She wants to undo him as much he undoes her.

Aramis smiles self-deprecatingly, looking down at the hat dangling loose from his fingers. “I had about given up on it myself. Your Majesty, forgive me, but this is most…” He makes a helpless sort of gesture at the room around them, or perhaps the universe at large. She understands: most idiotic, most dangerous, so much so that it seems imbecilic to put words to it.

“Yes. I know. For you far more than I. I hope you understand it was not a command. I would have you here of your own free will.” At this Aramis looks straight at her, and she feels it in every inch of her skin. “I have never been practiced in listening to my better judgment, Your Majesty.”

“And I am new at overriding mine,” she says. "Perhaps we can teach each other a thing or two.”

The words sound silly to her ears, an asinine attempt at seductiveness. But the first rule she had learned at her mother’s knee was to never let these feelings show, and she does get up now, in one elegant unfolding. Anne understands this part. The door shut behind Aramis a long time ago. She knows Marie sits outside it, keeping watch, but this doesn’t embarrass her. The most intimate moments of her life have always had an audience. Anne wonders what Marie said to Aramis. Probably winked and told him to enjoy himself.

She comes to stand before him. Her want is a living thing, with its own needs and desires completely outside of Anne’s own. It has starved for years and is now a gaping maw, which will consume what it will. Aramis reaches out and touches her jaw.

“Anne,” he says. “Anne.” Trying it on for size. “The risk you run is also great.”

She is suddenly irritated, although she knows it is with herself more than anything else. Anne sees how she might look through his eyes. A lonely little girl, helpless at the first sign of male attention, as if she isn’t an old hand at flirtation, practiced at it from the cradle.

In the next moment the irritation passes. Nothing in Aramis’ attitude towards her suggests he feels anything of the sort. She thinks back to that night at the convent, the bruised look in his eyes after she kissed him for the first time, and knows it is the opposite. She represents some weakness for him, some power over some tender inner place, although she cannot fathom what. It’s such a thrilling sense of power that she feels almost sick with it. And yet that power is not the strongest sensation: being in his presence is like preparing to withstand an oncoming wave, while already viewing one’s future self caught in the undertow and swept far out to sea.

Still. That moment of annoyance gives her an idea, a way to put herself back on equal footing. She takes his hand in her own, and draws him backward towards the bed while saying: “Do you think me completely innocent, Aramis?”

He shakes his head, bemused, as she sits on the mattress and reaches to where he comes to stand still before her to slide his belt through its loops.

“I presume nothing about Your Majesty.” Aramis’ voice sounds slightly strangled, but his eyes are steady on hers, keen and appraising.

“I liked it when you called me Anne.” This, so soft she can scarcely hear herself.

“Anne. I feel you will never cease to surprise me.” There is teasing warmth in his tone, and at a vague motion of her hand he continues to disrobe, quickly casting his jacket aside.

“I have had other lovers.”

He pauses here, from where he has been lowering his suspenders from his shoulders.

“Have you, then?” His voice has gone deeper, with snags catching in it. “Well, I congratulate you on your skills of discretion. Nothing against your reputation can be heard on the streets of Paris.”

Aramis pauses in his undressing and reaches forward to trace the line of her shift where it lies against her collarbone. She nearly gasps at the contact, her exhalation of breath painfully loud. He smirks.

She gulps. Anne has not intended what she is about to say, although not because she is truly afraid of his reaction. He has seen more of the world than she might ever hope too, after all. But it is a treasured memory, one she has kept close for years. She worries sharing it will lessen its power.

“It was not,” she says primly, “the sort of liaison one hears of often.”

Suddenly he is very close, his mouth only inches from hers, still smiling widely.

“Really? And who,” he lowers his voice dramatically, “would this lucky personage be?” All his earlier hesitation, the look of near trepidation in his eyes, has vanished, caught up in the game of desire they are playing.

She feels the answering curve of her own smile and answers, as she looses her shift from her shoulders to bare herself to the waist, “Ninon de Larroque.”

His smile vanishes on a tremulous exhale of breath and she feels his left hand where it rests in the linen of her shift clench, as he moves forward to kiss her. Anne welcomes it, opens her mouth to his tongue, as he slides an arm around her waist, bringing her breasts into contact with the coarse material of his shirt. His hand moves up her side, a light dancing touch that refuses to focus on any of the places she aches for.

After what seems a very long time, Aramis breaks away to lean his forehead against her own. Their labored breathing is a twinned cacophony.

“Have I shocked you, then?”

Anne attempts to bring this back to order. Make it into a game, a puzzle, a filthier version of his courtly attentions. Ignore how she wants to shove him back onto the bed and climb atop him, fill herself up with him until she can feel nothing else. Continue to pretend that this was exactly what she had decided it would be the morning after that first time: her one youthful indiscretion, the regulated bit of passion she has allowed herself, scantly indulged in and then rationally put aside.

He smiles, and their breath intermingles between them until the inches between their parted mouths encompasses the world. “I told you. I think you are always going to be surprising me.” He moves his mouth down to her cheek, kissing his way down toward the hollow between her neck and shoulder, stopping to suck gently at the thin skin beneath her ear.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” he says, “how did this liaison come about?”

She does not mind. In fact it is what she was hoping for; she finds she wants to share it, this knowledge of herself as a person of flesh, not some formless thing bounded in and given shape by fine cloth, and proclaimed in the name of almighty God as the Queen of France.

“I was eighteen,” Anne says, as he gently pushes her so she is lying horizontally on the bed, and eases her shift off her hips so she is completely naked. “And I was very lonely.”

He pauses from where he has begun to kiss the hot skin between her breasts and says, “You are not lonely now?”

She wishes he hadn’t said that. She wishes he were not looking at her like that.

But Anne says nothing and just shakes her head as he resumes his ministrations. “No. Worse. Three years and I still spoke French very badly. Marie de Medici was still in power. I was considered…extraneous.”

As a queen of France she knew that she had two roles, in the view of the court and the country and in those early years had been failing miserably at them both. In their eyes, if she continued to fail to produce the desired heir, she might at least have the courtesy to be entertaining. But she was no leader of fashion. Too Spanish, too severe, too inclined to religion. She had refused with perverse stubbornness to give up her unflattering Spanish garb, to rid herself of her uncouth Spanish accent. She occupied most of her time in writing letters of forced cheer to her brother, and ones of morose self-pity to her sister.

Ninon had been at court then, several years older than Anne and at that time still considered young. She was one of those girls blessed with enough money to enable her to have a very good time without much concern to how it would affect her future prospects. The conscientious intellectualism had not yet set in, and her wit was deployed mostly in writing love poems for her friends, while considering herself to be above such measures.

Aramis hmms against her skin, right at the underside of her breast and Anne feels every nerve end of her body, feels every inch of her skin where it rests against the bed. She is aware of how wet she is already, she can smell herself, can feel the dampening spot beneath her, and she is just beginning to talk about it. Aramis is just barely beginning to touch her.

“Ninon was the light of the court. I envied her.” Aramis cups her breast, passes his sword-calloused thumb across her nipple and as she continues her voice comes out high and strained and foreign. “So, one evening I called her too my rooms and dismissed all my other ladies and I ordered her to kiss me.”

He brings his head up from where he had drawn her nipple into his mouth, biting and licking at it, so she had grasped his upper arm, dug her nails in hard enough to leave marks. He asks, “Is this common practice among the ladies of the court?”

Anne jerks her head in assent. “Yes. More common than you might think.”

“And so you commanded Ninon to kiss you.” Aramis begins to move down her body, blowing hot air at the skin around her navel, biting at her hipbone, and everything in Anne tightens to an unbearable, blissful point. “Did she obey?”

“Yes. She – she could tell how hungry I was for it. To be touched.”

Aramis has moved between her thighs, parted her legs with hands and now rests there stroking the underside of her knee, the inside of her thigh, but does no more. Anne is making small whimpering noises that it takes a moment to recognize as her own.

“She kissed me back. She turned around and lifted her hair and let me unbutton her gown. Please. Please,” she chokes out, unable to request what she wants with any more eloquence than that.

Aramis obliges, with a hunger that reflects her own. He moves, and presses a messy kiss to where she is hottest and wettest.

“Keep going,” he whispers against her slick flesh.

She just barely catches his request because at this moment he parts her folds with his fingers, brushes his thumb across her clit in a teasing slide, and she moves her legs so they drape over his shoulders, angles her hips shamelessly towards his mouth.

As he licks her with the flat of his tongue, as he pushes one finger into her. She is so wet now she can hear it, a noise of filthy suction, and she has to force her voice out through a seeming obstruction in her throat. “I thought I was desperate to be touched, but really I couldn’t stop touching her. She was naked before me and I asked her to show me how I might please her.” Anne had felt magnanimous, then. It would have never occurred to her that the desire to please another in this way was merely a politeness. With the hand that is not occupied in crooking his fingers inside her, he pins her hips to the bed, seeking to still their helpless movements, fingers splayed over the soft skin of her stomach.

“She took my hand and showed me how to touch her,” Anne says. “She was so wet. She felt so different than I expected, different than how I felt when I touched myself.”

Aramis has begun to alternate his licks with small bites, just this side of being uncomfortable and at this he groans and sucks her clit into his mouth, and Anne yelps in a distinctly un-erotic manner. He laughs against her and adds another finger, stretching her wide.

Anne is leaving much of that long ago evening out. How she had invited Ninon to take a glass of wine with her, the look of near pity in Ninon’s eyes when she had made her demand with a ludicrous haughtiness born of fear. Why she had chosen Ninon because while she admired her, even envied her, she hadn’t liked her overmuch.

She can almost not speak now, she is so close, her thighs trembling with it. “She showed me just how to pleasure her, she used my hand like a tool. And afterward she did this to me, exactly what you are doing now.”

At this Aramis envelops the whole of her sex in a grasping, full mouthed kiss, with just a hint of teeth behind it, and Anne comes with her head thrown back and mouth gaping but no sound emerging.

Her entire body is loose-limbed in pleasure when Aramis has finished undressing and lays himself beside her. He kisses her shoulder, achingly tender. He pushes a sweat-dampened curl of hair back behind her ear, from where it had come to stick against her flushed forehead. She turns to him and kisses him softly, a small thrill chasing up her spine as she tastes herself there. She had not allowed Ninon to kiss her after. She had felt vulnerable, slightly ridiculous, with Ninon like a Grecian statue beside Anne’s own gawky teenager’s body. There had been the confidence and sweetness with which Ninon had pleasured her, and then the unpleasant feeling that had followed, as if Anne was now in her debt.

She feels his arousal, damp and hard against her hip, and although limp and wordless, a small tug of her hand on his upper arm seems to get across what she wants and he moves so his body covers hers, her knees falling apart to accommodate him. His cock brushes against her entrance, and she is so sensitive that that small contact causes a full body shudder, like the twanging of a plucked harp spring.

“Any other lovers? What about your husband?” he says into suddenly her ear. Anne can tell, from the hitch in his breath that he knows his mistake even before he feels the skin of her hip under his palm stiffen.

She remembers her wedding night vividly. She remembers being stripped, pinched, plucked, and shaped into adequacy. She remembers holding onto the words of her governess from before she left Spain like a rosary. _You only get out of it what you put in. Do not just lie under him, like a stone. Make him feel as if he is welcome._ Anne did not even have at this point any clue what exactly it was he would be doing on top of her. Still, when Louis was led in, after they had prayed together and the first prince and princess of the blood had slipped the robes from their shoulders, all under the apprising eye of the Queen Mother, they were finally left alone together, and she tried her childish hand at seduction. Louis looked at her with bafflement, disgust, and she could smell his fear, she could see the way he trembled.

Later, when she is older and perhaps wiser, Anne can understand it. She wonders why that shared infant terror did not bind them together. But in that moment, what had swelled up at his sneering look was a monstrous pity, a feeling of helpless resentment towards this terrified boy, who did not have the decency to put on a brave face for her, like the one she so steadfastly put on herself.

If she were inclined to make grand sweeping statements, she would say that moment was what doomed her marriage, that moment of scornful tenderness mixed with humiliation. She had taken her petty revenge. She had lay like a stone on the bed and waited, naked, and forced him to do what he must with no encouragement, eyes resolutely cast heavenward. Afterward, he had shrugged on his robe and gone to tell his mother and the officials of the court that waited outside the door that all had been accomplished. Congratulations were offered. Louis then removed himself to sleep in the quarters of his own childhood, while she lay alone, entombed in the bed of state he himself had been born in.

In a moment she wants to tell Aramis all of this. Then she dismisses it. She does not allow herself to dwell on it often.

“I apologize,” he says. “That was tasteless of me.”

But she does not allow Aramis to draw back. She brings her hand to rest on the back of his neck, and she smiles.

“No,” she says. “Just dull.” She touches the corner of his mouth, his eye. “The lover asking after the husband? I had expected better from you.” She kisses him and whispers, “Tell me of your lovers, instead.”

“Porthos,” he says, immediately. “My brother-in-arms Porthos.”

Anne can hear the raw edge in his voice, feels his hips jerk thoughtlessly against hers and knows he does not say this to shock her, to set forth a game as she did. He is surrendering himself entirely to this moment and to her, and he could no more not speak of it than he could draw away from her now, than he could get up and leave the room.

She moans a bit, at the thought of it, and while she is caught up in the pictures it evokes, Aramis pulls her so she is astride him, hands clinging to his shoulders. His hard cock brushes against her stomach.

“Tell me. Tell me what you do together,” she whispers as she reaches between them, her hand stroking along his length.

He buries a breathless laugh against the hollow of her throat.

“Sometimes,” he says, “after a mission, we get back to garrison and are running so high on adrenaline that Porthos doesn’t wait to report or clean up, he just drags me into some corner and sucks my cock, right there in broad daylight.”

As she grasps him and sinks down slowly onto him, he hisses out a soft curse.

Anne can feel where her nails are digging into the flesh of his back, leaving scratches that he will wear away from this room, under his uniform.

Her body has begun to do the work for her with no input from her mind, hips building up a frantic rhythm. The image Aramis has painted has made her painfully close to coming again already. With one hand, she gently pushes on his shoulder, and he obeys, falling back to lie flat on the bed.

Anne rides him steadily, as his hands come to rest on her thighs in a tight grip. He is not attempting to guide or set the pace, but merely clinging to her for dear life. She knows she will carry bruises tomorrow, beneath the cage of her skirts.

As she feels herself getting close, she angles her body so she is laying full across him, her hand locked under his jaw and squeezing lightly. She brings her lips to his ear and says: “Does he fuck you? Like this?”

With a groan he flips them over, hiking her legs higher on his hips and driving into her with several deep thrusts, and she comes, internal muscles contracting, and he follows, face buried in her hair.

-

They lay together after, side by side, breathing harshly in a companionable rhythm. The question slips out before she can stop it.

“Does Porthos know you are here?”

He turns and smiles at her. “No. He would be angry with me.”

She arches an eyebrow. “He is a jealous lover, then?”

Aramis snorts. “God, no. But the risk I run would anger him. He professes to be quite fond of me, you see.”

Anne feels her throat tighten with some unpleasant feeling. Not of jealousy, but of sadness at the hint of an entire shared world, an eternity of stories and intimacy contained in the fondness of his words, despite their flippancy. And anger, at herself for her foolishness in this, anger at the thought that she does not have the power to break Aramis’ heart but perhaps what they are doing has the power to break his neck. Contempt that it is not enough to make her stop.

But all she says is: “Well, he is quite correct. You are a person of inestimable value, Aramis.”

He brings her hand to his lips and kisses her palm. “I would say the same of you, Anne.”

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between episodes 9 and 10.


End file.
